


Follow Me Down to Georgia

by sylviarachel



Series: It Gets Better (Check Please! edition) [2]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bitty gets his anxieteer tendencies from his mama, Coming Out, Crying, M/M, conspiracy of hockey moms, hockey players in love, mostly just people talking tbh, questionable rendering of how people from Georgia talk, supportive parents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-09
Updated: 2016-10-09
Packaged: 2018-08-20 10:21:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8245594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sylviarachel/pseuds/sylviarachel
Summary: Suzanne Bittle has been waiting for this moment for a long, long time. Or, after the events of “Staggering (under the weight of all the truths I'm not telling)”, Bitty and Jack call Bitty's parents.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chocolateforyou](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chocolateforyou/gifts).



> Soooo [chocolateforyou](http://archiveofourown.org/users/chocolateforyou/pseuds/chocolateforyou) wondered what that phone call to Bitty’s parents at the end of [this fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8071975) would be like. I had, of course, Some Thoughts About That. Here they are.
> 
> ([“Staggering”](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8071975) has of course been pretty comprehensively (and fabulously!) jossed by updates 3.9–3.11, but I wrote this anyway BECAUSE FIC. You may find this story easier to understand if you read that one first.)
> 
>  **CW:** references to miscarriage/pregnancy loss; references to generalized cultural homophobia; references to bullying and running away from home.

Suzanne’s first thought, when her phone rings just as everyone’s about to sit down to Sunday dinner at her sister-in-law’s, is that something terrible has happened up in Massachusetts. Sunday evening after supper has been her (and sometimes Rick’s) weekly skype date with Dicky for more than two and a half years—not that she and Dicky don’t chat at random moments throughout the week whenever they feel like it, but Dicky _knows_ that Sunday after church is a time for putting down your phone and talking to people. Followed by football, usually, although thank heavens the Super Bowl is over and done with now. (She’d never say it to Rick, but, Lord, she gets awful tired of football sometimes.)

So when she hears the faint and muffled sound of her phone ringing from her pocketbook—Dicky’s ringtone, which he programmed to match his short-program music when he was fifteen and she’s never changed—Suzanne almost drops her coconut chess pie in her haste to get her phone out and pick up the call. Because if Dicky is calling her in the middle of Sunday dinner, he must have a very good (which is to say, very _bad_ ) reason.

By the time she’s handed off the pie to Julie, dug out her phone, and swiped across the screen to answer the call, her hands are shaking—and her “Dicky? What’s the matter, honey? Do you need me to come up there?” comes out a little shaky, too.

There’s a surprised, breathing silence on the other end of the call, and Suzanne’s anxiety-prone mind is already spinning out horrifying scenarios. A hand on her shoulder, another on her elbow, and she realizes Rick’s behind her, steering her towards Julie’s sofa just barely before her knees start to buckle under her.

It seems like forever, but is actually only a few seconds, before Dicky’s voice, a little wobbly, says, “I’m fine, Mama. Why would something be the matter?”

Suzanne’s too bludgeoned by confusion and relief to speak; Rick gently takes the phone out of her hand, walks the length of the living room to get as far from everyone else as possible, and says calmly, “You called your mother in the middle of Sunday dinner at your aunt Julie’s, son, what did you expect? And if you don’t mind my sayin’, you sound a bit out of it to me.”

 _Oh, good Lord_. Suzanne is up off the sofa and grabbing for her phone before Rick knows what’s hit him—but of course he’s enough taller than her that it’s not much effort for him to keep it out of her reach.

It’s too much, is what it is. “Eric Matthew Bittle,” Suzanne commands, “you give me that phone this instant!”

Rick freezes with one hand up above his head—blinks at her like she’s grown antlers—brings his arm down and meekly hands her the phone.

“Dicky, sweetheart,” she says into it, “please tell me what on _earth_ is goin’ on.”

“I,” says Dicky. “Um. Are y’all … did Coach say y’all are at Aunt Julie’s? I’m sorry, we—I can call back later.”

_We?_

Suzanne grabs Rick’s elbow with her free hand, then gestures frantically at the phone, trying to convey _I think he’s finally going to tell us!_ without using actual words.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” she says, into the phone. “Whatever’s important enough to interrupt Sunday dinner for, it’s important enough not to put off. You hold on a second, honey, your daddy and I’ll be right with you.”

She cups one hand over the bottom of the phone where the voice pickup is, waves the other towards the table, and whispers frantically to Rick: “Monster trucks!”

It’s a code phrase from Dicky’s early childhood, not used in years, and it takes Rick a second to pick up on it; but once he does, he swings into action like she knew he would. “Sorry, Julie, Bill,” he says, striding back toward the dining room, where Julie’s trying to get everyone to sit down at the table instead of standing around goggling at the unprecedented interruption. “Bit of an emergency. We’ll see all of y’all next week at our place.”

He doesn’t specify what kind of an emergency—Rick’s a doer, not a storyteller—and he gathers up Suzanne (and her phone) and whisks her out of the house before anyone can ask. In no time flat they’re down the front steps and climbing into Rick’s truck, which thank goodness they took this morning because Suzanne is pretty sure she couldn’t drive right now if her life depended on it. (If Dicky’s life depended on it, though, she’d drive all the way to Massachusetts right this minute.)

“Dicky,” she says, once they’ve got their seatbelts on and Rick is backing out into the street. “Are you still there, sweetheart?”

“Yes, mama,” says Dicky.

Rick turns onto the main road a bit too fast, and someone leans on their horn in response. “Mother,” says Dicky, suddenly sounding much more like himself. “Please tell me you are _not_ driving and talking on the phone.”

“I am talking on the phone,” says Suzanne, “and your daddy is driving. I’m gonna hang up the phone now, but we’ll be home in ten minutes, and then I am calling you back on Skype and we are going to have a real good talk, young man.”

“Yes, ma’am,” says Dicky meekly.

Suzanne ends the call and sits staring blankly ahead of her for a minute.

Finally Rick says, without looking away from the road, “Does this mean what I think it means?”

Suzanne shakes her head, gripping her phone in one hand. “Honey,” she says, “I really do not know.”

*

When the Skype call connects, Suzanne has to suppress a little yelp of triumph, because sitting there next to Dicky on an unfamiliar chocolate-brown leather sofa is, as she half suspected, Jack Zimmermann.

“Hi, sweetheart,” she says. “Hi there, Jack.”

“Ma’am,” says Jack, nodding to her, then to Rick. “Sir.”

Dicky looks pale and shaky, almost but not quite like he did after that incident in the seventh grade that he thinks she and Rick don’t know about; Jack looks calm and steady, but Suzanne can see he’s looking down at Dicky out of the corner of his eye, and when Dicky says, “Hi, Mama. Hi, Coach,” in that heartbreakingly wobbly voice, Jack frowns a little and his arm curls protectively around Dicky’s shoulders.

Dicky goes still for a moment, his eyes darting from here to there to somewhere else, but never towards the screen. Suzanne gropes for Rick’s hand and squeezes it hard, to keep back the words that want to spill out of her mouth: _we love you, of course we love you, what made you think anything, anything, could ever change that—_

He needs to choose for himself what to tell them, and how, and when. The family therapist they (briefly) saw after the Greyhound Bus Incident of 2008—the second one, because Dicky took one look at the first one and shut up like an oyster—stressed this over and over: _The way you get kids to tell you important things is to make sure they feel safe, not to interrogate them. This is about Eric, not about you, and he gets to choose what he shares with you._ Suzanne knows that, she does, but that doesn’t make this agonizing waiting any easier.

“Mother,” Dicky finally says, looking down at something not visible on Suzanne’s laptop screen. “Coach. I called y’all because … because …”

His voice trails off into silence, and Suzanne can’t stand it anymore. “Dicky,” she says, “can I say somethin’ first? Whatever it is you’re gonna say, _whatever it is_ , it’s gonna be fine and your mama and daddy are still gonna love you all the way to the moon and back, you hear?”

She’s halfway to crying by the end; Rick slings an arm around her shoulders, and through her tears she sees Jack not missing the way they are now sitting in the exact same positions as himself and Dicky.

Dicky looks up at the camera, finally, and sees her trying not to cry, and his face—it’s still her sweet little boy’s face, with the same big brown eyes, but now it’s a man’s face, too—crumples up painfully, then disappears behind his hands.

“I’m gay,” he says, through the gaps between his fingers. His voice is full of tears. “I’m sorry, I know it’s not what you wanted, but it’s who I am. And—and—”

Tears are blurring Suzanne’s vision and dripping down her cheeks; Rick tightens his arm around her shoulders, squeezes her hand, murmurs, “It’s gonna be okay, Suzie.”

Dicky takes a big, shuddering breath, lets it out. Lets his hands fall away from his tear-stained face.

Looks his mother in the eyes.

“And Jack’s not just my friend,” he says. Finally, finally. “He’s my boyfriend.”

He stares at his parents, scared and defiant and hopeful, and Suzanne wants to howl in grief and remorse at how obvious it is that he’s been terrified to tell them these things, that on some level he still is. That he only half believes that they’ll still love him.

“Thank you, honey,” she chokes out. “Thank you for telling us.” _Finally_ , she doesn’t add. Also, _What took you so long?_ and _Oh, bless your heart, did you think we wouldn’t see how you two were looking at each other?_

“I got one thing to say to you, son,” says Rick, very seriously. “But first I got some things to say to Jack.”

Jack pulls Dicky closer against him and looks Rick square in the eyes. “What would that be, sir?”

“You’re a pro athlete,” Rick says. “You and I both know what kind of life that is, and it may not be fair and it may not be right, but that don’t make it not true. Now, I love my son—”

There’s a tiny, broken sob from Dicky as he turns his face into Jack’s shoulder, and Suzanne abruptly wonders how long it’s been since he heard those words from his father.

“—and I’ll be honest, I do not feel good about him being someone’s dirty little secret.”

Dicky’s head comes up whiplash-quick and he stares at Rick in outrage. “It’s not like that!” he says indignantly. “It’s _not_.”

“No, it definitely isn’t,” says Jack, his hand rubbing up and down Dicky’s arm and shoulder. “I … I don’t want to be out publicly in my rookie year—I’m not ashamed, I’m not ashamed of me and I am _absolutely_ not ashamed of being Eric’s boyfriend, but I want … I _need_ to show that I can do this, that I can play in the NHL, before … before I give the media anything personal to pick me apart over.”

He swallows visibly, tilts his dark head just perceptibly toward Dicky’s blond one. They both need haircuts, good Lord. _These boys._

“But my parents know I’m, um. Not straight,” he continues. “One of the Falcs AGMs knows, and a couple of my teammates. And they all know B—Eric, and they know who he is to me.”

“Which is what, exactly?” says Rick, looking steadily at Jack. Suzanne elects not to mention to him— _ever_ —how much he sounds like her own father interrogating a new boyfriend when she was … well, younger than Dicky is now, anyway.

Jack glances down at Dicky, and for the first time looks … not nervous, exactly, but as though he’s not sure what to say. Dicky looks up at him, and even through the grainy skype connection on her four-year-old laptop screen, Suzanne has no doubt at all what she’s looking at: two young people in love.

They smile at each other, tender and almost shy. Then Jack turns back to the camera and says firmly, “Everything.”

Rick blinks.

“Well,” he says. “I guess we understand each other, then.”

“I guess we do, sir,” says Jack Zimmermann.

They exchange firm, decisive man-to-man nods.

“Now, Eric,” Rick says. 

Dicky sits up straight in surprise. “Yes, sir?”

“You listen up, son.” Suzanne can feel Rick’s pulse kick up, can hear his throat click as he swallows. “I’d like to say I don’t know where you got the idea that this was something you couldn’t share with your mama and me, or that we’d be disappointed in you, or that there’s anything about you that would make us stop loving you.” Swallow. Dicky is listening in frozen, incredulous silence. “I’d like to say that, but it’d be a lie, ’cause I can make some pretty shrewd guesses. So what I want to say to you is, I’m sorry.”

“We’re both sorry,” Suzanne puts in. “We could never be disappointed in you, sweetheart.”

“We are proud of you,” says Rick, “and we love you, and we want you to be well and happy, and that’s that. And I am sorry for anything and everything I’ve done that made you doubt it. I’m not gonna ask you to forgive me, but I hope you can, one day.”

Suzanne isn’t surprised when he folds his arms and stops talking at this point; that was already a lot more feelings-talk at one time than she’s heard from him in practically ever.

But she is surprised by Dicky’s response, which is to reach towards the camera and say, in a very small voice, “Thank you, Daddy.”

That word—which Dicky hasn’t used since shortly before that ill-fated peewee football game when he was just a little thing—is what makes Jack’s eyebrows fly halfway up his forehead, and makes Rick’s eyes go glassy and his breathing hitch, and makes Suzanne burst into noisy sobs.

“I love you, Daddy,” Dicky says, and his face (still pink and blotchy from crying) curves into a soft smile. “I love you, Mama.”

“Oh, baby, we love you too,” Suzanne manages. “So much.”

Jack turns to Dicky, tilts his head so his nose is buried in the soft blond curls. He probably doesn’t intend Suzanne or Rick to hear his murmured “See, Bits? I told you it’d be okay, bud. Just like Maman said.”

And Dicky almost certainly doesn’t intend his parents to hear him reply, through a series of unfortunate sniffles, “Believe me, honey, I’ve never been happier to be wrong.”

They’re so wrapped up in each other, for the moment, that neither of them sees Suzanne and Rick exchanging a look of heartbreak and remorse. _And I am going to have a talk with Alicia Zimmermann. It sounds like I owe her a big hug and a lot of pies._

They look back at the screen when Jack clears his throat, tugs at the stretched-out collar of his Samwell University t-shirt, and says, “Mrs Bittle? Coach? I have something to say, too.”

“You go right ahead, honey,” Suzanne urges him. _Now, what’s this all about?_

“Um,” Jack begins. Suzanne sees Dicky squeeze his hand—a strong little hand wrapped around a stronger, bigger one, the way her own hand wraps around Rick’s—and smile up at him encouragingly. “I, um. I just wanted to say—I know this isn’t, _I’m_ not, probably what you wanted for Eric, and I know it hasn’t always been easy, and it’s not always going to be easy, because I’m not an easy person—no, Bits, you know what I mean.” Dicky doesn’t stop frowning at him, but he stops trying to interrupt or contradict. “I just … I wanted you to know: Bitty—Eric—and I, we’re a team.”

Rick chuckles, and Dicky’s frown transmogrifies into a blinding grin before he leans his shoulder hard against Jack’s side, and Jack just keeps looking at her with the most earnest expression she’s ever seen, and Suzanne understands that what she’s just heard is Jack Zimmermann expressing the strongest possible commitment to her son.

“Of course you are, Jack,” she says, smiling at both of them through a new haze of tears, because look at them holding hands and being adorably happy together. Rick is going to be awkward about this for a while yet, she knows, but, Lord, his face when Dicky called him _Daddy_ for the first time in a decade …!

“Okay,” says Jack, still very serious. “I mean. Thank you, ma’am.”

“Mama?” Dicky says, from under Jack’s arm, and more tentatively, “Daddy? I, um. I’m real glad y’all know now? But you can’t tell anyone about Jack. I mean, not yet.”

“Of course we won’t, sweetheart.” Suzanne looks from Dicky to Jack to make sure they understand that _she_ understands. She doesn’t say _Who on earth would we tell?_ and neither does Rick, but she knows he’s thinking it too.

And it breaks her heart all over again to think about that: how her sweet boy and his sweetheart have to hide from the world, because the world can be so cruel and hateful and _wrong_.

“Not even Moo-Maw.” Tears are drying on Dicky’s cheeks, and his hair is mussed from burrowing into Jack, and once again he looks simultaneously like his twelve-year-old self and like a grown man with grown-up problems who’s only half familiar. 

How, Suzanne wonders, is it possible to love one person so much? But she does, she always has, from the moment they first heard his tiny heart beating through the ultrasound machine. She’d tried not to, then—tried not to get attached, because of what had happened the first two times—but Dicky was as stubborn then as he is now, apparently, and he clung on tight and stole her heart long before she ever saw him.

“Not even Moo-Maw,” she repeats solemnly, and holds up her left pinky finger: “Pinky swear.”

And she doesn’t add, _If you think your Moo-Maw hasn’t already figured you out, sweetheart, then you don’t know her at all_.

Somewhere in the room behind Dicky and Jack, someone’s phone makes a repeated chirruping noise. Jack frowns and looks around vaguely; Dicky jumps up, jogs out of camera range, and a moment later says, “Jack! We forgot about lunch!”

Jack’s eyes widen very slightly; he looks down at the watch on his left wrist, then says loudly, “Tabarnac!” and then, with a deeply guilty look at Suzanne, “Sorry, Mrs Bittle.”

That must’ve been a naughty word in French, then. “Honey,” Suzanne says, trying not to laugh at him, “please call me Suzanne.”

Before Jack can reply, Dicky pops back into the frame, wearing a slightly harried smile, and says, “Sorry, Mama—sorry, Coach—we’ve gotta go now, or we’ll be late for lunch with Sh—um, with Mr Crappy and Larissa.”

They exchange hurried goodbyes, and Dicky disconnects the call.

Suzanne and Rick look at each other.

“He’s not a little boy anymore,” she says, finally.

“Suzie, he ain’t been a little boy for a long time,” Rick points out.

“No, I know, that.” Suzanne sighs. “It’s just … Lord, honey, what did he think we were gonna say?”

Rick sighs, too, and shakes his head. He looks very tired. “Maybe we shoulda been more honest with him,” he says. “Told him we knew about those boys locking him in the janitors’ closet. Told him we knew how bad it was getting, told him why we moved, why I took this job instead of the promotion in—”

“We didn’t want him to blame himself for you turning that promotion down,” Suzanne protests, “or feel responsible for us picking up and moving. Because you know he would. But you’re right—maybe it would’ve helped him understand we were always on his side.”

Suzanne’s phone buzzes. She checks it almost absently, and then has to wipe her eyes, because the buzzing is a very long text from Dicky:

_I’m sorry you were worried about me, Mama. I didn’t want to say this in front of him, cause he gets real embarrassed, but Jack is so good to me, and he has been for a long long time. I know I was a miserable so-and-so at Christmas but that wasn’t Jack’s fault. I know I didn’t look it today with all the crying, but I’m real happy, Mama. Me and Jack, we’re a team like he said, and we’re gonna be okay. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell y’all sooner. I just … I had some stuff to figure out, in my own head. Get ready, though, cause now that I can brag on my amazing boyfriend, you’re gonna hear a lot about NHL hockey :)_

And then another, shorter one:

_Love you, Mama. <3 <3 <3_

She blows her nose and dabs at her eyes again and reads the text out to Rick, who smiles and snorts and says, “I guess we’re gonna be watching hockey and rooting for the Providence Falconers from now on, huh.”

Suzanne’s grin is a bit watery, but real. “Well,” she says. “We already got the hats.”

**Author's Note:**

> Chess pie: <http://www.southernliving.com/food/kitchen-assistant/chess-pie-recipes>
> 
> Love you all the way to the moon and back: Señor Bun reminds me very much of Big and Little Nut-Brown Hares in the book Guess How Much I Love You, which I picture Suzanne Bittle (and maaaaybe even Coach?) reading to a teeny-tiny Eric and Señor Bun at bedtime. It was first published in 1994, a year before Bitty was born :)
> 
> I headcanon Suzanne as being a bit over-protective of her only child because of losing other pregnancies. (I’m also a mom of an only child, for unpleasant biological reasons rather than on purpose, and for a person with a bunch of siblings, it can be pretty weird.) I personally do not actually believe that embryos or fetuses can be stubborn or not stubborn, and I am 100% in support of women’s right to choose what happens to their bodies.
> 
> I also headcanon Jack bringing Falconers hats (and maybe other merch) to Georgia as gifts for Bitty’s parents, because Jack is a giant dork.


End file.
